Tran said she works a full-time job, a part-time job and takes advanced placement and dual credit college level courses. She said she is often too exhausted to wake up in time for school. Sometimes she misses the entire day, she said. Sometimes she arrives after attendance has been taken.

Judge Lanny Moriarty said he was making an example of Tran. “If you let one (truant student) run loose, what are you gonna’ do with the rest of ‘em? Let them go too?”

An 11th grader, Tran works full time at a dry cleaners and weekends at a wedding venue. She lives with the family that owns the wedding site. Her brother is in college; a younger sister lives with relatives. Why isn’t Tran living with relatives? My guess is she didn’t want to switch high schools.

A $63,000 grant — which expires in five weeks — will fund the program. (Someone must be making a lot more than $100.) The program was organized in a hurry: Only 25 percent of students enrolled are chronically truant; the rest are borderline truant or attending school regularly but doing poorly.

(Ramona) Pearson-Hunter who has been in charge of the district’s truancy efforts for the last year said some of the truants cite boredom.

“We know we have to keep them active,” she said, adding that she suggests students ask teachers for extra-credit activities to remain engaged.

They’re bored because they don’t have enough assignments? Or is it possible they’re bored because they don’t understand the classwork?

After Sept. 30, the students will be asked to promise to attend regularly.

On the other coast: Told to pull up his sagging pants, a San Francisco student became belligerent, according to his teacher, who called the police. The student was not arrested.

Rhee was more effective than her predecessors, he writes, contradicting a recent study (pdf) by Alan Ginsburg, a former director of Policy and Program Studies in the U.S. Department of Education. And, contrary to a National Research Council (NRC) committee’s preliminary analysis, which downplays progress, there’s reason to believe Rhee’s reforms made a difference.

Like Ginsburg and the NRC committee, Peterson looks at NAEP data, since it’s a low-stakes test with no incentive to cheat. He excludes the scores of charter schools beyond Rhee’s control, which caused a blip in the data in 2007, inflating pre-Rhee progress. He finds progress accelerated after Rhee took over as chancellor.

Once the data are corrected and adjusted for national trends, it becomes evident that during the Rhee years, fourth-grade students gained at a pace twice that seen under her predecessors in both reading and math. The gains in math by eighth-grade students were nearly as much, although no eighth-grade reading gains are detected.

Gains are not enormous in any one year, but over time, they add up. In 2000, the gap between the District and the nation in fourth-grade math was 34 points. Had students gained as much every year between 2000 and 2009 as they did during the Rhee era, that gap would have been just 7 points in 2009. Three more years of Rhee-like progress and the gap would have been closed. In eighth-grade math, the gap in 2000 was 38 points. Had Rhee-like progress been made over the next nine years, the gap in 2009 would have been just 14 points, with near closure in 2012. In fourth-grade reading, the gap was 30 points in 2003; if Rhee-like gains had taken place over the next six years, the gap in 2009 would have been cut in half.

The NRC committee claims that District gains “were similar” to those in 10 “other urban districts” for which comparable data is available.

In fact, D.C. students gained 6 points between 2007 and 2009 in both math and reading, while the average gain for the other 10 cities was just 1 point in reading and 2 points in math. In eighth-grade math, D.C. gains were 7 points, as compared to an average of three points for 10 other cities. Only in eighth-grade reading did the District lag behind, dropping a point while elsewhere, students gained 2 points.

The committee also admits that student and teacher attendance improved significantly during Rhee’s tenure, but questions the significance of the change.

Rhee said she wanted to change the culture, Peterson notes. When students show up to learn and teachers show up to teach, that’s considered a very good sign. But Rhee’s enemies don’t want to give her credit for anything.

Hoping to get two brothers to go to school, Principal Ernest Jackson and a school psychologist walked uninvited into a home in Chester, New York to rouse the boys, 12 and 16 years old. Jackson faces trespass charges.

A criminal complaint alleges Chester Academy Principal Ernest Jackson entered the home without permission when the two boys didn’t come to school in late September, and actually tried to coax them out of their beds.

You don’t walk into someone’s house,” Melanie Hunter said. “I could’ve been coming out of the shower.”

The mother wasn’t home. The father, who filed a complaint, doesn’t live with the family.

The principal, now on leave, shouldn’t have walked into the house. As for the mother who can’t get her sons to wake up and go to school, you’ll be able to live with your boys for years to come. They won’t be able to finish high school, get jobs and move out of the house.

Update: Principal Jackson and the psychologist were reinstated after witnesses confirmed they were invited into the house by a the students’ 20-year-old cousin. “The state has now cleared Jackson and Kavenagh of misconduct and the Village of Chester police have dropped their investigation for trespassing for lack of evidence.” reports the Times Herald-Record.

Mentors can help students’ succeed — or harm their chances, reports Education Week. Long-term mentoring relationships benefit children. Students with short-term mentors — less than six months — do worse than those with no mentor at all, concludes David L. DuBois, a University of Illinois at Chicago researcher and a co-author of a study in the Society for Research in Child Development’s Social Policy Report.

“You could actually see studies where the youth in the treated group end up showing more negative change to things like self-esteem, propensity to get involved in risky behavior” than the control group, Mr. DuBois said in a panel on the studies earlier this month. “So obviously, it’s a handle-with-care intervention.”

Low-performing schools often try to recruit volunteers to serve as mentors. Federal funding for school-based programs peaked at more than $100 million in 2006. But most school-based programs don’t create lasting mentor-student relationships. In three studies, researchers found the mentor-student relationship averaged less than six months.

. . . The Social Policy Report meta-analysis found school mentoring programs improved students’ sense of academic efficacy, the level of peer support they had, and relationships with adults outside the family, while reducing truancy and school misconduct, provided the students remained in the program for a year. Still, the researchers noted that the results suggested those improvements could be lost if the students’ mentoring did not continue.

Most school-based mentoring programs last a semester or an academic year and include only campus activities. But “41 percent of students in the Big Brothers Big Sisters study continued to meet with their mentor, both in school and out, into a second year.” The “bigs” spent more time with their ”littles” and developed a closer bond.

I just volunteered to be tutor two elementary students in reading. Since I travel quite a bit, I enlisted my sister to fill in when I’m out of town. I don’t want the kids thinking they’ve been forgotten. Of course, Peggy and I no longer pass for identical twins.

Laid off after her first year of teaching algebra, geometry and humanities at a California high school, Michele Kerr is open to judging teachers on performance rather than seniority. But she’s only willing to be judged on her students’ success under certain conditions, she writes in a Washington Post op-ed.

First, she proposes that teachers be judged on the students with 90 percent or higher attendance. “Teachers can’t teach children who aren’t there.”

Second, teachers should be allowed to remove disruptive students.

Two to three students who just don’t care can easily disrupt a class of strugglers. Moreover, many students who are consistently removed for their behavior do start to straighten up — sitting in the office is pretty boring.

Administrators can decide “what to do with constantly disruptive students or those teachers who would rather remove students than teach them,” she writes.

Third, Kerr would forbid students to move on to the next course if they score below “basic” proficiency in a state test. Teachers wouldn’t be blamed if students who don’t know algebra can’t learn geometry or those who can’t read at a ninth-grade level can’t keep up in sophomore English, history or science.

Not only is it nearly impossible for these students to learn the new material, but they also slow everyone else as the teacher struggles to find a middle ground. By requiring students to repeat a subject, we can assess both the current and the next teacher based on student progress in an apples-to-apples comparison.

If Race to the Top is to have meaning, we have to be sure that students are actually getting to the top, instead of being stalled midway up the hill while we lie to them about their progress.

Finally, teachers should be judged on student improvement rather than meeting an absolute standard. That sort of “value-added” measure is what’s proposed in performance plans, so it’s her easiest condition to meet.

No one’s willing to admit how many students “are doing poorly because they simply don’t care, their parents don’t care, their cognitive abilities aren’t up to the task or some vicious combination of factors we haven’t figured out — with no regard to teacher quality,” Kerr writes. It’s easier to write tests that nearly everyone can pass and blame teachers if they can’t get semi-literate students through a college-prep English class or teach algebra to students who never learned arithmetic.

Is this doable? Letting teachers kick out disruptive students would be very useful, I think. Holding back students who lack basic skills would be painful, but it would force an intense effort to teach them what they need to know. I think that would help students more than dumping them in classes they can’t understand and hoping for the Clue Fairy to touch them with her magic wand.

I’d bet many teachers would be willing to be judged on the progress of on-track, in-class students.

Prosecutors accuse (Kari Shannon) Brandt of forging signatures and creating doctors’ notes on 12 occasions between December 2009 and April. The reported notes were written for three of Brandt’s children, ages 6, 7 and 8 . . .

In nearby Glenn County, two couples were charged with felony forgery of excuses.

William and Shannon Anderson were accused of altering the date of a doctor’s note in January, but Glenn County Superior Court Judge Peter B. Twede said the penal code section cited by Glenn County authorities — the same cited by Tehama County prosecutors — did not apply because the note in question was handed to a teacher and not an investigative body.

Another local couple still face the same charges.

In my day, a note from the parent — or from a student with adult handwriting and diction — was enough for an excused absence. I used my writing skills only for good — to help out my sister when she forgot to ask Mom for a note. I didn’t realize it was a felony.

Claire Landau teaches third grade in Philadelphia, where truancy is common for both teachers and students. She writes to her sister:

Your teachers and students go to school with a purpose. For a purpose. Here in Philly, school is a place you show up at (or don’t show up at) each day. This is true for students and it is clearly true for teachers as well.

. . . Raising attendance means schools must come up with innovative ways to make their communities feel responsible for the school and make parents feel accountable for their children’s performance in school. For teachers, raising attendance, means creating a space where teachers are supported and feel motivated to work hard and give their energy.

Finally, measuring attendance and demanding that both, teachers, parents and students do better would mean that, instead of continually passing the buck, we would all have to deal with each other.

A 2004 survey reported that 78 percent of middle and high school teachers have been subjected to legal threats from students bristling with rights. Students, sensing the anxiety that seizes schools when law intrudes into incidental relations, challenge teachers’ authority.

Someone hurt while running at recess might sue the school district for inadequate supervision of the runner, as Broward Country knows: It settled 189 playground lawsuits in five years. In Indiana, a boy did what boys do: He went down a slide head first — and broke his femur. The school district was sued for inadequate supervision. Because of fears of such liabilities, all over America playgrounds have been stripped of the equipment that made them fun. So now in front of televisions and computer terminals sit millions of obese children, casualties of what attorney and author Philip Howard calls “a bubble wrap approach to child rearing” produced by the “cult of safety.”

In Washington state, students are entitled to a lawyer at a truancy hearing, an appellate court has ruled.